Innovation that Matters – 2016

Preface: I’ve been living and working in the Boston region for 30 years now.  A native upstate New Yorker, I’ve now spent far more time in Boston than in the place I think of as my hometown.  Even though I spent the first decade renting, and hopping around the region, I have now lived in my home here longer than the house I grew up in. Recently, our partners from Washington, 1776 (we worked with them on the Boston Challenge […]

Industry Analysts: Analyst Relations

While doing some research on Quora recently, I noticed a question from someone wondering about a tech startup looking to hire someone to do “analyst relations.”  Since the firm was a long way from having to brief financial analysts — the only type of analysts the asker was familiar with – they were understandably confused.  I left this answer:

How to Inspire Life Long Fans

Bit of a personal story: the younger son is a pickier eater than his elder sib. The Tall One will eat anything and is infamous for things like, at age four, trying to talk his grandmother into trying sushi.  Into her trying sushi, not the other way around.

Why Dennis Keohane Joining Pando is So Exciting… for me

I first met Dennis Keohane when he was writing for VentureFizz.  A veritable one-man show, he was turning out great feature local tech and startup feature stories for our friend, Keith Cline, and helping to turn VentureFizz into much more than a nice local calendar and job board.  Then he moved on to the Globe and Beta Boston, and continued to turn out great stories about local companies.  Now it’s been announced that as of the end of the month, […]

The Ladies Room – Part Two

I spent some time this week at the Maine Startup & Create Week – which was so well done, BTW — fantastic city/fantastic people and amazing event.  On Monday, one of the panels was called “Women and Entrepreneurship.”  I’m not sure if it was a stroke of genius, or highly ironic, but the panel was held in the Portland Masonic Temple — yes, the fraternal order of Masons which largely excluded women for centuries.

The UP Global Summit: Las Vegas 2014

(As many of you know, I also started Innovation Nights 5 years ago.  In this time more than 600 new products have been launched at our Boston region events and we are currently expanding into other cities. It is in this role that I write here today.) Recently I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the UP Summit in Las Vegas (100 degrees but it is a “dry heat”.)  The gathering of 550+ startup community leaders billed […]

Dear Las Vegas Tourism Team

Can we talk? I know you are all awesome at your jobs.  I mean, “What Happens in Vegas…” is a true classic, spawning a thousand imitators but I think you missed something.  This is an example of not getting to know your potential customer well enough.

LinkedIn Contacts: A Reason for Concern?

Part of our job is to play Social Media Guru for our clients.  As such, we watch LinkedIn closely — this is the top professional social networking tool and an important tool for many of our professional services clients.  LinkedIn often tinkers with its existing features and provides new functionality frequently.  (They also take stuff away, witness the recent folding of LinkedIn Answers, and less recent loss of their events function.)

Standards

There are certain technology tools that “everyone” uses for a reason.  There are times you can wander off the reservation and times when you should stick with what you should know (or what others know.)